Tim Anderson's ITWriting

Tech writing blog

September 14, 2004

10 reasons Microsoft developers should look at SharpDevelop

Posted 4469 days ago on September 14, 2004

SharpDevelop, the open-source development IDE for .NET, has recently announced its first full 1.0 release. Here's 10 reasons why you should take note.

Unlike Visual Studio .NET, or even Borland's Delphi/C# Builder IDE, SharpDevelop is coded in C#. Yes, I know there is plenty of .NET code in those other IDEs, but Microsoft's IDE is primarily coded in C++, and Borland's in Win32 Delphi.

So time to throw away Visual Studio? Not for most of us: Microsoft's product has many more features and SharpDevelop comes up short in a few areas (no full debugger, no ASP.NET designer, weak online help etc etc). If you are targetting Mono and running on Windows, SharpDevelop may well be the best choice; and of course there are a few other things in SharpDevelop that you won't find in Microsoft's tools.

The key point is this: .NET developers now have more choice, with three major toolsets on offer (Microsoft, Borland, SharpDevelop). Of these three, SharpDevelop is the one that at least is cross-platform aware, which to me is a big deal and good for the platform. By the way, I firmly believe that cross-platform .NET is good for Microsoft too, so this isn't a matter of Linux advocacy or anything like that.